Edmund Curll
Curll rose from poverty to wealth through his publishing, and he did this by approaching book printing in a mercenary and unscrupulous manner.
His early practice was to work in conjunction with other booksellers to write, publish, and sell pamphlets and books and to exploit any furore to produce "accounts" and arguments.
He carried and published erotic literature[1] and mixed it with serious Christian calls to prayer, "medical" texts, and the like.
One of his earliest productions was John Dunton's The Athenian Spy, but he also had titles like The Way of a Man with a Maid and The Devout Christian's Companion.
In 1708, he published The Charitable Surgeon, a feigned book of medical advice on syphilis cures from a pretended physician of public spirit.
Curll kept publishing his Charitable Surgeon, however, and expanded it with A new method of curing, without internal medicines, that degree of the venereal disease, called a gonorrhea, or clap.
In 1712, Curll's shop was so successful that he opened a branch in Tunbridge Wells, and he moved to a bigger store on Fleet Street.
One feature of Curll's career, and the one that most cemented his reputation through the ages, was the unauthorized publication of works originally produced by another house, often against the author's wishes.
The quarrel with Tonson, and Prior's objections, only served as publicity, however, and Curll published the book anyway.
His connection with the anonymously published Court Poems in 1716 led to the long quarrel with Alexander Pope.
[2] Curll got three anonymous poems, by Pope, John Gay, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Pope published two pamphlet accounts of the incident and informed the public (a la Swift's Bickerstaff Papers) that Curll was dead.
The next step in the Pope/Curll battle came in 1716, when Curll got a bawdy version of the first Psalm written years earlier by Pope.
Curll suspected that Pope and his friends were somehow responsible for his treatment, and he began to employ the "phantom poet."
To siphon off sales of John Gay's poems and to wound Pope and his friends, Curll used this phantom twice more.
He was notorious for commissioning hack-written biographies of famous people as soon as they died and for publishing them without regard for inaccuracies and inventions.
Thus, his method was to announce that a biography was about to be published and ask the public to contribute any memories, letters, or speeches of the deceased.
[2] In 1718, Curll published Eunuchism Display'd, and Daniel Defoe attacked it as pornography, calling it a "Curlicism."
In 1724, he published Venus in the Cloister, a translation of a mildly erotic French title of the previous century that argued that it is the church, and not Christ, that forbids sexual exploration.
The work contained state secrets from the reign of Queen Anne, so Curll was nervous.
They spent fourteen months in prison (to February 1728) and were fined for the Nun in her Smock and The use of flogging, and sentenced to an hour in the pillory for publishing Ker's memoirs.
In fact, no figure, including the "King of Dunces" Lewis Theobald (nor, later, Colley Cibber) is ridiculed as consistently and viciously in Dunciad as Edmund Curll.
The Popiad, written possibly by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Female Dunciad, and The Twickenham Hotch-Potch all came out in 1728 as answers.
In 1731 he moved shops to Burleigh Street and advertised an upcoming life of Pope, saying, "Nothing shall be wanting but his (universally desired) Death."
In his last years Curll published a series of "Merryland" books which constitute a major contribution to the somewhat peculiar genre of English seventeenth and eighteenth century erotic fiction in which the female body (and sometimes the male) was described in terms of topographical metaphor.
